BAROMETER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 513, 22 April 1949, Page 21

BAROMETER

he can never get back into his routine again, even when he succeeds in getting rid of the interloper and his wife back into her normal state of mind. This might have been just another triangular bedroom farce, but for Louis Jourdan. Ably assisted by Lilli Palmer as the attractive wife, he gives a scin- | tillating performance as a kind of. psychological lobster in this bath-tub of connubial bliss, and he cuts such a dash in his accurate lampooning of the petu-_ lant, self-indulgent artist who is always pretending to emotions he doesn’t really experience, that he lifts the film to a high level of sophisticated comedy. He has lean sardonic features and a talent for drollery that fit the part exactly, while his neat sense of timing and a knack of rousing the sympathy of the audience make Dana Andrews’s solid, unpretentious acting seem rather colourless by comparison. Altogether this is a_ slickly-produced picture. The pace never slackens, the intellectual level is always fairly high, and the dialogue always worth listening to. When Dr. Aswell suggests, for instance, that Qualini might cure _ his neuroses if he visited a psycho-analyst, the painter replies that he has "lain and freely associated" on the couches of every analyst in town, and that they have all pronounced him a hopeless / case. The film also makes good comic use of the device in which you hear the character thinking aloud and battling with different sides of his nature (id versus super-ego sort of thing) and the changes are rung om one or two other hackeneyed tricks in a refreshing manner. No Minor Vices was produced and directed by Lewis Milestone.

FAIR TO FINE: MAINLY FAIR: Urge." ‘"‘No Minor Vices." "That Wonderful